Keeper (2025)

Score: 2 / 5

Osgood Perkins has been the weird new kid on the block for a while now, and he's still doing weird new kid stuff. He plays around in various genres (fairy tale, haunted house, detective procedural, school kids) and makes them creepy, uncanny, and loaded with suggestive and subversive meaning. This time, it's a romantic drama at center, which I recently discussed a bit with this year's Together (so check out that review in the link). It's interesting that Perkins did not write this, though: penned by Nick Lepard it is, whose other notable work this year, Dangerous Animals, will be reviewed by yours truly presently, but suffice to say for now that it too has some really fucked up gender messaging. Protagonist Liz is visiting a private cabin in the woods with her boyfriend of one year for the weekend, and we know it won't end well. Part of the pleasure in these movies is to see just how and where things go wrong, as they inevitably will.

Liz and Malcolm are cute enough that I at least hoped they might work out. That's rare for me in a movie about heterosexuals. Tatiana Maslany is a capable actress, and this is one of the rarer instances of her doing some nice understated work. She's a bit mousy and slight, taking in her surroundings with a believable wide-eyed wonder, but too skittish for me to understand why she even trusts her beau enough to not be with him in public. But when things get scary -- and they indeed do -- she reminded me more than a little of Sally Hawkins, and that's where Maslany's skills really manifested. Rossif Sutherland (unknown to me) plays Malcolm, a gentle but firm bear of a man who seems to have ulterior motives and secrets while ingratiating his girlfriend to the large and luxurious cabin. While he has the challenging role of being an obvious bad guy, I was disappointed that Sutherland (and, to be fair, the way Malcolm is written) didn't work harder to complicate the character or at least breathe life into him. He channels the energy of an SNL parody of a sad dad during the holidays, which is decidedly not the vibe for this story. 

Thankfully, I was distracted from the [insert the antonym for chemistry] by the house itself. If you know my cinematic tastes at all, you should know I'm a sucker for the architecture in a horror film. And Perkins and cinematographer Jeremy Cox have the delicious pleasure of bringing this stunning house to life visually. And thanks to the house's designers and, I suspect, the editors (who do some really amazing and meaning-laden slow dissolves transitioning between scenes), it's almost impossible to understand the house's layout. There always seem to be too many doors and floors and windows. If the story calls for a house to literally lose oneself in, your production designers can't do much better than to make a physically impossible house! It's become all the rage, I daresay, since Danielewski's House of Leaves was published, but that's a different conversation. 

The enchanting house loses its fascination as the plot fails to keep up. Blatantly obvious in its thematic and narrative purpose, the film only remains watchable thanks to the qualities I've already mentioned. Beyond these, it's a terrible doldrums to endure. The couple has some serious issues when it comes to communication as well as personal esteem, and almost every line feels on the verge of an argument neither wants to have. They're both clumsily attempting to negotiate expectations and affection and hesitation in ways that feel like they're incapable of comprehending independently. Their borderline codependence is aggravating to witness in the same way sitcoms can be: if they would just communicate more honestly and openly, we wouldn't even be in this mess!

Yet in the mess is where Perkins wants us. Malcolm awkwardly insists on Liz eating a slice of chocolate cake apparently left for them by the housekeeper. Bizarre request notwithstanding -- he has a housekeeper? Who bakes? And just does this? For anyone? And we know nothing about ingredients or cleanliness or the kitchen itself for fuck's sake -- Liz objects because she simply dislikes chocolate cake. His passive aggression simmers until an equally bizarre and uncomfortable encounter occurs: Malcolm's obnoxious playboy cousin arrives with a model who supposedly can't speak English but warns Liz not to eat the cake. Yet, seemingly in defiance of the bimbo, Liz does. Lo, and behold that bad things ensue.

Yet this point is reached so early in the film that it can't ratchet up the tension slowly. The familiar premise devolves into familiar patterns of heavy genre tropes: Liz, often alone in tedium, hears a noise or sees a shadow, explores the house, finds nothing or gets scared by something banal, and then has a nightmare about it in which there is something horrific lunging at her. She awakes, certain that something is very wrong yet doing nothing sensical about it. Perhaps most interestingly, and thanks to Maslany more than to the screenplay, we witness Liz mostly nonverbally calculating the extent to which she loves Malcolm and herself in ways that suggest she knows it's a zero-sum game. She mysteriously keeps eating this disgusting cake in nauseating ways, seemingly beyond her own control; yet her waking self wavers on thinking it's an innocent price to pay for the man she loves and might actually want to "keep," as the title suggests.

So when the climax and denouement buckle down on our very correct first impression, this intriguing aspect of the title is also applied in various ways: Liz may be a "keeper" (one who is kept by a man) for Malcolm, but she's also a "keeper" of new charges. We double down on the men being cartoonish villains who systematically collect and use women in a nonsensical supernatural lore that is unceremoniously dumped in the film by a character who literally enters for the sole purpose of explaining this dumb plot to us. It makes no sense, not least because it's basically a Faustian bargains with a monstrous woman reproducing a la The Brood who needs to consume other women so the cousins can live forever. Thankfully, as by the halfway point of the film I was bored to distraction, the miserable second half of this film does benefit from the presence of monsters so cool in appearance that they captured my attention each time they graced the screen. Really fantastically creepy design, there guys.

And then there's the final scene, which I'm sure has layers of obscure symbolism, as in all Perkins films. It just doesn't make enough sense to feel satisfying, and I will spoil it here because its frustrating opacity is a prime fault of this film (and of its auteur). Having been accepted and possibly possessed by the monsters, Liz's eyes turn black like theirs while Malcolm, his bargain undone, ages rapidly. She hangs him upside-down from a tree and force-feeds him the drugged cake (I told you this crap wasn't subtle) while he insists that he loves her. Knowing full well his lies, she dunks him into a jar of honey to die (a symbol associated with his original victim, the mother of the monsters, who Liz resembles, hence her acceptance by the monsters). That's it. I understand the female revenge plot, but not if she's now part of a monstrous family or cult. The film's otherwise thoughtful spins on gender and norms fail utterly in the final scene, cementing the legacy of this film as one with some neat visuals and a compelling lead performance that is in no other way significant to the genre, the craft, or our memory; in other words, not a keeper.

The Monkey (2025)

Score: 3.5 / 5

Mike Flanagan is in the news again for making more Stephen King film adaptations but it's Oz Perkins who helmed The Monkey. Based on King's 1980 short story of the same name, the plot concerns a cursed toy monkey that causes somewhat random brutal deaths. That's it. Simple, straightforward, easy. No demonic entity or possessive spirit of a serial killer, no flawed AI taking over, no expansive mythmaking or origin lore. Just death, meted out by the kind of nightmarish plaything that is sure to make you ask, "Who would actually play with this, and how?"

Perkins, who came into the spotlight last year for Longlegs, is much more impressive a filmmaker when social media conversation isn't hyperbolically lauding his as "the scariest movie of the year" and such drivel. I'll maintain that The Blackcoat's Daughter is much more terrifying than anything Nic Cage eked out from his mime makeup, fun as that was to see. His Gretel & Hansel and I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House are masterclasses in Gothic atmosphere and detached storytelling. But the serial killer weirdness in Longlegs implied a turn in Perkins's aesthetic, and The Monkey certainly leans into a gonzo style we haven't seen from him yet. In his case, bigger spectacle isn't camp, which has been growing in popularity (though often misunderstood and mislabeled); it's just horror, a frank look at the absolute mess death often brings with it.

That's not to say it's a morose affair. This macabre experiment in tone indeed features several moments designed to elicit aloud cries of joy and surprise. Think Final Destination, but without the obsession those characters have with outsmarting or escaping death; those feature a certain hope and agency that Perkins's film pointedly does not share. The Monkey will "getcha," and it's going to be gross and strange, and there really isn't rhyme or reason to it. Its opening sequence demonstrates this, as a messy (read: bloody) Adam Scott (Krampus, Little Evil) barges into a pawn shop to sell the ape doll and its little drum, looking as grim and horrified as... well, as someone who usually does comedy would in bloody clothes at night while lugging around a cursed toy that could cause his death at any moment. Perkins has been a confident filmmaker from his start, but a film this popularly oriented could have slipped from his grip; not so, and it's in scenes like this that he reminds us of his absolute control over complex and heightened tone.

Time jumps ahead, and the story proper concerns twin brothers, Hal and Bill, who discover dad's toy monkey (despite our having seen him destroy it) and activate it. It was in a closet with his remaining stuff, dear old daddy having absconded mysteriously after that prologue scene. First it's their babysitter who bites it -- almost literally -- and then the boys realize every time they twist the monkey's wind-up key, someone near them dies. By the time it takes their weary mother (Tatiana Maslany) from them, the boys drop it down a well and soon become estranged. We jump again twenty-five years into the future, and, as any King fan will tell you, the twins' hidden past returns with a vengeance.

The barrage of death scenes in this film are graphic, to be sure, but they aren't really meant to be taken seriously. It's Grand Guignol for the postmodern crowd. A woman jumps into an electrified pool and explodes. Yet, despite laughter in the screening auditorium I attended, the comedy is notably uncomfortable, as if Perkins is inviting us to laugh and then asking why we did so. There's a tense undercurrent of inevitability as the film implicates the audience in its massacre. We often say that God has a sense of humor when good things happen in roundabout or odd ways; what if Death has a sense of humor, too?

You might wonder why I bring God into a discussion of this amoral, bleak, grotesque exercise in violence and irreverent humor. But the film's ending, which I won't spoil here, suggests that Perkins himself has some biblical ideas in mind regarding the nature of the monkey and its task among humanity, and its inclusion of a specific apocalyptic character is presented in earnest, not in satire. Perhaps he's saying that if Death can laugh at us, we should laugh back at it; a worthy message itself, this gains power when you consider Perkins's personal story as well as King's. We know about his father -- a relationship that still arouses curiosity among fans, especially as daddy issues keep cropping up in Perkins's films -- but a little-known factoid is that Perkins's mother died on the plane that struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. As Longlegs was clearly more about Anthony Perkins and The Monkey has more heart for Berry Berenson, I'd be curious to see them billed in a double feature together and would love to hear Perkins give a talkback. That would be a therapy session for the ages!

Perkins, as writer and director, added a lot to King's story, making it his own in the process. Yet it's a lean, mean hour and a half of adrenaline and violence with nary an ounce of unnecessary weight. No matter how interested I might be in the auteur's influence, the point remains that this is a straightforward and accessible film about random death and a cosmic indifference or even cruelty toward human life. Our age of "elevated horror" and films that require dissertations (or shitty YouTube videos) to explain their nuanced intricacies needs films like The Monkey to jump in, shake things up, and leave us wanting more. I hope we don't get it.

Longlegs (2024)

Score: 3.5 / 5

Oz Perkins, like his style or not, only makes fascinating films. His latest, Longlegs, is an effectively disturbing and entertaining example of both what works best in his movies and what never quite lands with his stories. The Blackcoat's Daughter featured a puzzle box of a screenplay that never quite pays off but embraces its own stabs at time and place; I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House is indeed pretty and haunting to behold but feels generally inert; Gretel & Hansel fabulously attempts folk fantasy horror while gradually forgetting its own source material in favor of original, half-baked ideas. Perkins seems to get lost in his own head a lot as a writer, cleverly tinkering with his own ideas until they become difficult to absorb as the audience. Not that films should always explain themselves; it does help to have a few firm handles for us to grasp, though, so our discussions aren't solely attempts at interpreting basic symbols, characters, and themes.

I won't spoil the plot, but it's not what you think. Its most basic setup is not dissimilar to The Silence of the Lambs, but a young female FBI agent investigating a serial killer while using a possibly insane scary man in white as her informant is where the structural similarities stop. Visually and aurally, the film ramps itself up almost to the level of camp, with violent color shifts and bold, uncompromising choices of costume, makeup, cinematography, and scoring. Its exaggerated sensory experience feels matched by its performances, particularly its two leads in Maika Monroe and Nicolas Cage: Monroe is unbearably stilted and forced (for a reason), while Cage is utterly transformed into a new creature (in which his typical overacting is somewhat muted and spectacularly stylized). There's a surrealist streak in Perkins's work, and this is as ripe as it's ever been.

A mildly exaggerated '90s setting -- refreshing in our era of endless fantasizing about the '80s -- belies the rich colors and stoic cinematography that provide our view into this strange and uncomfortable world. And even from the film's opening scene, Perkins and his editor craft a perverse dream logic that pervades our experience of the film, yes, but also of the story. This helps us understand Monroe's protagonist, Lee, a bit better, as she manages to correctly intuit and interpret clues from crime scenes, several of which reminded me of the real-life Zodiac killer, though her suggested pre- or extra-cognition is a bizarrely underdeveloped subplot. 

Which brings me to my issues with Longlegs: I just don't understand it. SPOILER ALERT. This is going to be a fairly random series of questions and thoughts on particular points of the film, and please feel free to comment your own ideas, because that's all we're going to get from a discussion of this weird movie.

- Lee's partner (Blair Underwood) near the beginning makes a reference to the Manson family right near the beginning that, fittingly, ties in to the reveal of Lee's mother's complicity near the end, but I didn't think the film would fully go that direction. In addition to the Zodiac killer and the Buffalo Bill/Hannibal Lecter references, Longlegs himself seems to have some Ted Bundy or Dracula or even the singer Tiny Tim in his performative DNA. The smorgasbord of serial killers seems to have been circulating in the filmmakers' minds to an unusually emphasized degree. 

- Lee's mother Ruth (Alicia Witt) always asks her if Lee has said her prayers; her ultra-religious identity isn't satisfyingly mined until the climax. It's unfortunate, because it seemed at first to be aiming for something akin to Carrie White's mother Margaret. Her revelation as the villain's assistant is shocking, maybe, but more emotionally sound than logically; the visual of her in a brown habit delivering enormous dolls feels ripped from another movie entirely. Perkins has gone on the record saying that this is his most personal film yet; one wonders the extent to which he feels his own mother was complicit in family secrets and generational trauma regarding his own father, Anthony Perkins, whose queerness was certainly kept hush-hush at home. It's telling, then, that Ruth suffers so much at the hands of Longlegs. (Also note that our introduction to Ruth is as she comes up the stairs, after taking too long to answer the phone, suggesting she spends time with Longlegs in the basement often.)

- Longlegs (Nicolas Cage) as a character would be fascinating to read. I suspect his dialogue has significance beyond what sounds like mostly random ramblings. A rewatch with subtitles will help, as I am sure all his dialogue in itself would reveal more about his character or motivations and probably clear up a lot of the confusion; it's just mostly hard to capture on a first viewing. The dialogue of the film in general is stilted and stylized, and I'd also love to see the strange monologue from Kiernan's Shipka's Carrie Anne (?) in her single scene, when she delivers super calm threats to Lee like a Pennywise on overdosed mood stabilizers: she'd be "as happy as peaches to watch your head go pop pop pop."

- What's with the intense use of red and white shots? What's with the almost subliminal shots of snakes in red light? What's with the unnecessary silhouette of a horned, robed Satanic shadow? What's with the metal balls in the doll heads, and what's with the black smoke that comes out of them? Other than the atmosphere of coloring, these elements don't add to the story as I understood it. The snakes might tie in to my next point, but a literalized devil takes away so much mystique of Longlegs's Satantic aspirations, and the dolls could have been possessed and evil without a sci-fi or fantasy element involved that used excessive effects to demonstrate something that should be merely implied at best.

- It seems Perkins, in addition to packing in references to other serial killers, imagined the nature of evil in this film to be a reverse trinity, a diabolic trio of Satan/dragon/red snakes/horned shadow man, Longlegs/Antichrist/Beast from the Sea (and the repeated verse about seeing him while standing on the sand of the sea), and Ruth/False Prophet/Beast from the Earth (she spreads Longlegs's message to others). Perhaps the dolls or metal orbs are the mark of the beast? Is this stretching too far? I'm not sure it is, given the references to the Book of Revelation, and of course the film's central themes (and, as Perkins indicated, his most personal theme) of a realization of hidden knowledge, with "apocalypse" and "revelation" both referring to that hidden knowledge being revealed or made known.

- Does the finale indicate that Lee herself will become the next Longlegs, as she does not (cannot?) destroy the doll? Remember that Longlegs -- who should be dead at this point in the story -- calls Lee to remind her of little Ruby's party. Longlegs is sort of Lee's director or mentor, having apparently orchestrated so much of Lee's life and manipulated her, even her psychic abilities. Lee has always wanted to be an actor, as she told Ruby early in the film. Longlegs later says he laughed when she became an FBI agent; perhaps because she was fulfilling his plan to investigate the killings and her own mother and have access to a gun to enact murders of her own (including Ruby's family -- Lee's partner and his wife -- as well as her own mother? Does she "become" him? Remember, too, that his final words to her before killing himself are "Well, I'll let you get started now."

- Other possible themes might include truth being hidden by corrupt faith, the nature of faith itself and the lengths to which we go to live it out, outing evil parents or how parents' actions will infect their children through life. There's also an interesting parallel between the film, Lee, and us. Perhaps we're meant to learn a lesson about getting too caught up in symbols and imagery and narrative and meaning while missing the big picture or emotional truth of art. 

A film like this will launch hours upon hours of social media rants and "ending explained" videos and TikToks of people puking their opinions and interpretations, and maybe that's fine and dandy for the studio and for the film's circulation. But shouldn't a film be worth that hype and interest? I'm not convinced this one deserves its buzz. Perkins is always worth watching, as his control over tone and mood and atmosphere is bleak, his violence is brutal, and his rich themes are complex and not at all obvious. This film is fabulously entertaining and hard to shake after viewing, but when any given detail requires footnotes and references and time stamps and mansplaining and obscure tie-ins and niche techniques and arthouse logic and video essays to even understand some possible interpretations, I can't help but feel the artists did a disservice to their own work by not being specific enough. Clearly there was intention in every aspect of bringing this story to the screen; too bad nobody can wholly access it.

Gretel & Hansel (2020)

Score: 4 / 5

If Terrence Malick decided to remake The Witch and include elements of Grimm fairytales, it might look something like Gretel & Hansel. Though the plot -- what little of it there is -- of this picture essentially hits the main expected points of anything adapting the old story, plot is so secondary you might be convinced that the plot has been effectively erased here. This is not a mystery, and it's not even very thrilling or scary. Even its themes are so abstract it's hard to say I really grasped what the film was going for, and though I enjoyed it, I'm keenly aware that lengthy bits escaped me. I can't even say confidently that I "understood" parts of the movie. But its beautiful, dark aesthetic captured my heart, and I'm looking forward to watching it again.

We begin with a prologue that dramatizes, through montage, the witch's backstory: a young, hyper-feminized girl (dressed in anachronistic pink) is discovered to have "second sight" and the power to induce other people to kill themselves. Her motives are unclear, but when she is exiled to the deep, dark forest, she enchants her new home to apparently lure in stray children. As an older woman, the witch is a deliciously wicked-looking old crone who wears all black with a pointed hat Elphaba would envy, but her most recognizable feature is her fingers, which are mostly black as if she had dipped them in a vat of tar.

Immediately apparent is the emphasis on female power here: after this opening sequence, we're introduced to Gretel, age 16, and her brother Hansel, age 8. And of course the inverted title of the film indicates the shifting power dynamic from male to female; this is, unequivocally, Gretel's story, and so her name is first in the title. Their mother, driven mad by starvation -- there's a famine in the land -- sends Gretel out to make a living. When Gretel realizes the only options are to be abused by men or to starve, she chooses the latter, only to have her mother despairingly attack her. Fleeing into the forest with her brother, Gretel is forced to act as a mother while trying to find safe haven and food. After a particularly bad trip on some mushrooms they consume, the children find a lonely house in the woods.

Oz Perkins (The Blackcoat's Daughter, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House) is up to his usual tricks here, and it certainly won't be to everyone's liking. He is a master of the slow-burner, deliberately pacing his dark fantasies until they are almost inert, forcing us to meditate on the horrors on screen. In this way, Perkins has set himself up as a new genre auteur vitally interested in philosophical horror (as opposed to the more traditional, popular brands). And while you might not expect this approach to a Grimm brothers fantasy, Perkins has anticipated that.

He weaves a spell of modernity into his apparently timeless tale, including themes of untrustworthy adults as well as feminism, capitalist awareness (everything comes with a cost) as well as where, exactly, witches (and fairytale stories themselves) come from. These added conceits make the story deeper and more interesting even if they don't add excess baggage to the simple plot. Similarly, Perkins's aesthetic hints at this melding of past and future, modern and timeless: the forest and village seem haunted by ages and sins past, while the witch's house is cold and erect, strikingly modern even as it feels old as time. Its cold, white basement is hidden effectively by layers of worn wood and a warm hearth with a veritable feast day after day. It's all carefully calculated to be uncanny, that is, at once beautiful and wrong.

After the widescreen prologue, the film closes into a storytelling format that makes everything appear contained within pages of a book or old photographs. Cinematographer Galo Olivares (Roma) seems to understand that the nature of his medium in this instance is best married to the material. But his delivery, combined with Perkins's vision, is uncommonly beautiful. Much like in Malick's work, the first half of Gretel & Hansel uses an active handheld camera to follow the kids into the woods as we hear Gretel's abstract voiceover narration; it's an odd choice, one that draws a parallel between the naturalistic and poetic in fairytale stories. But, especially once the kids are in the witch's home -- which is decidedly not made of gingerbread -- the lighting dramatically shifts into the realm of giallo, with strong red, yellow, and blue lights shining in from various obscure angles.

I am still hopelessly confused on the inclusion of Charles Babalola as a huntsman. The scene involves the children seeking shelter for the night before being attacked by something (it has the form of a person, but is it? Who knows?) that is promptly killed by the huntsman. He warns the children of wolves nearby, suggesting that he's actually on his way to a different Grimm story in the same woods, but then he disappears for the rest of the movie. He'll not be coming to Gretel's rescue. Other questions remain after the film ends, including why the woodshed is so terrifying and any sort of real understanding of what the witch is really up to. And while a repeat viewing might answer some questions for me, it won't answer all, and I don't think I want it to. The mystery and magic works best when we're still digging for significance. As an atmospheric descent into a familiar story reworked into something dazzlingly beautiful and bafflingly complex, Gretel & Hansel is already one of the most interesting movies of the new year.